Four suicide bombs in 45 minutes on the bloody streets of Baghdad

By Jack Fairweather in Baghdad

12:01AM GMT 28 Oct 2003

The blackened wreckage of an ambulance smouldered outside the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad yesterday, the remains of a vehicle of mercy converted into a purveyor of death. Water from a burst main was already washing away the blood and immersing the scattered body parts.

Half an hour earlier a suicide bomber had driven the ambulance, apparently marked with Red Cross or Red Crescent symbols, up to the entrance of the building in the centre of the Iraqi capital. As a security guard approached he pressed the detonation trigger, killing at least 12 people.

"I saw this ambulance driving up toward the Red Cross, and then suddenly it blew up," said Ghani Khadim, 50, a cigarette vendor. "There were bodies everywhere," said Abdul Mustafa, an International Committee of the Red Cross staff member who was in the building. "I had just arrived for my shift when the bomb went off. I was thrown through a door and knocked unconscious. When I came round I went outside. The guard who approached the bomber lay in a pool of blood. He died in my arms."

American tanks and humvees had thrown a protective cordon around the site to keep back crowds of Iraqis but could do little to disguise the devastation.

The explosion had scattered vehicle parts hundreds of yards away, and knocked down the defensive barriers and sections of the wall surrounding the headquarters. Inside the building shattered glass littered the floor, doors had been blown off their hinges and ceilings had collapsed. Ambulances drove between the site and a nearby hospital with the dead and the dozens of injured.

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Saleh Hadi, whose house is opposite the headquarters, said: "When I ran out onto the street there were clouds of black smoke and people screaming. Guards from the ICRC were shooting at the wreckage but it was too late by then."

At the Ibn Nafiz hospital doctors and nurses raced to treat a never-ending flow of wounded. In the mortuary 12 bodies were laid out, burnt and disfigured.

The first of the multiple bombers yesterday attacked the Baya'a police station, to the west of Baghdad, just five minutes before the Red Cross was hit. A man driving a pick-up truck and describing himself as a building worker gained access to the compound before detonating his explosive-laden vehicle.

The station, used for joint American and Iraqi patrols, was opened only a few weeks ago.

"We found many pieces of my colleagues on the ground," said Abdel Zahar Salim, a policeman at the station. A fellow officer, Said Abdel Shahid, added: "I heard a huge explosion and saw a huge cloud of black smoke and car parts and tyres fly into the air. Then the cars caught fire and the whole scene was just terrifying."

An investigation had been launched to try to piece together who might have been behind the attack, although there was precious little to work on, other than the account of one Iraqi policeman that the attacker had a large beard.

The Shaab police station was attacked 20 minutes after the Red Cross building.

A horse lay in the street, blood flowing from its chest, as police cars raced past. Rescue workers carried away remains so badly mutilated that it was hard to tell whether they were of a human being or an animal.

"It was a Landcruiser car that was speeding towards the police station. The [guards] fired on it four times. It turned right and blew up," said Mohammed Ali, a local resident.

"How can anyone do this? What did these civilians do to deserve this?" asked one man who watched the destruction from his balcony across the street.

But angry crowds gathered to denounce the American presence in Iraq at the blast site's security cordon.

One man pulled off his shirt and beat his chest outside the rolls of barbed wire, "Kill Americans, Kill Americans," he shouted. It transpired that the man's brother was being held in the police station when the suicide bomber struck, and was feared dead.

In the wreckage of his shop less than 200 yards away from where bomber drove into a crash barrier, an Iraqi merchant cursed the nervous-looking American soldiers on guard nearby.

"I've just lost everything I owned. These bombings never used to happen under Saddam. It's been a terrible morning but I think there will be many more like this to come," he said.

The last of the bombers struck the Khudra police station, 45 minutes after the first blast, driving a pick-up truck at high speed into crash barriers outside the compound before detonating the bomb. The blast removed the front of the building and mowed down dozens of passers-by in the rush-hour traffic.

One woman was decapitated by a sheet of glass. Her son, also killed, lay nearby. Other bodies lay across the road with their clothes removed by the force of the explosion.

Taha al-Khadra, who helped to remove the injured said: "The policemen were laughing and praising God that they were still alive. Everyone else was screaming." An old man who had a leg blown off in the explosion was conscious enough to ask that his wife be informed as he was led away to an ambulance.

An hour after the attack American troops sealed off the area amid fears of another bombing. "This is chaos, make no mistake about it," said one soldier.